Sunny Afternoon tells the
story
of the rise and fall and rise of a real 1960s rock band, as recalled
by those who were there, with the group's songs punctuating and
commenting on the narrative.

It is, in short, a British
counterpart
to Jersey Boys, with The Kinks in place of The Four Seasons.

The
songs are arguably better and certainly more ambitious, the narrative
significantly weaker. It undoubtedly helps to be a 50-year Kinks fan,
but it's not necessary.

The book by Joe Penhall,
following Ray
Davies' memories, begins with four guys – Ray, his brother Dave and
two friends – forming a band, having a couple of hits, being ripped
off by managers and agents, becoming very big, going a little wild,
barely surviving a disastrous American tour, being torn apart by
personality clashes and lawsuits, starting over – and do you see
the problem?

Ray Davies may be remembering
accurately, but if so, the
Kinks lived out an archetypal pattern common to just about every
musician of the 1950s and 1960s. True or not, it plays like an
unimaginative B-movie and Joe Penhall is unable to make it seem
individualised or in any way more than a string of cliches.

There
are actually some hints that Penhall is doing this deliberately.
Subsidiary characters are all exaggerated types, from the brothers'
salt-of-the-earth father through the stage-Jewish record company guy
to the gangsters and rednecks in America, and even the major figures
are given just a single note to play.

Ray is a sweet and earnest
guy who finds it easier to express himself in song than in
conversation, while Dave is the essence of randy alcoholic rock star
(individualised only by occasional transvestism). The dialogue is
sometimes so thick with cliche that you have to admire the actors
for getting through it with straight faces.

Why would Penhall
deliberately write badly? Perhaps to underline the archetypal nature
of the Kinks' adventure. Or maybe he just wrote badly. In either
case, and in contrast to the interestingly multi-layered narrative of
Jersey Boys, there isn't much to Sunny Afternoon's story-telling to
hold you.

Fortunately there is always
another Kinks song coming along
every few minutes, and they are good. Some are presented as
performances or recording sessions while others, sometimes
anachronistically, express Ray's emotions of a moment or comment on
the action. Certainly it is the music that carries the show.

Ray
Davies could write hard-driving rock (You Really Got Me, Lola) with
the best of them, but he could also be wickedly ironic (A
Well-Respected Man, Dedicated Follower of Fashion) and it is nice to
be reminded of his more thoughtful and elegiac side, as represented
by Waterloo Sunset, the title song or Sitting In My Hotel.

John
Dagleish convinces us that Ray is an all-around Nice Guy but is less
successful in making us believe that all these songs came out of him.
George Maguire can't do much with Dave, and everyone else admirably
doubles and triples roles playing Everyone Else.

Ed Hall's direction
doesn't have quite the lightness of touch that would be needed to
bring life to the plodding story, and Adam Cooper's choreography is
limited largely to TV backing-dancers routines.